Chamber of Deputies

Meanwhile, life went on, and work at the Central Bank continued. One of the most important projects in the bank’s IT department was the implementation of ITIL. We had several training sessions to understand what ITIL was, and soon a large project began to roll out a tool capable of managing all aspects of service management, as defined by the framework. The main focus was organizing the incident and problem cycles within the Central Bank’s IT department.

The chosen tool was from HP. It was extremely complete, which also made it quite complex. Deploying the tool required a huge number of fields, categories, and decisions, all things that had not existed before. Most of the choices and decisions ended up being made based on intuition, primarily because of the lack of practical experience with ITIL within the organization. This led to the creation of workflows that were perhaps more complex than needed, and to an extremely detailed definition of all the possible classifications for each record in the tool, such as incident, problem, and others.

From the perspective of an analyst who needed to use the system day-to-day, you had to spend a huge amount of time just filling in all those fields. That naturally generated some resistance to using the platform. The fact that the tool’s front-end was a Java application that ran locally on the user’s machine, rather than a web interface, as was becoming common at the time, also didn’t help.

I remember it was a large and long project, but the tool was finally deployed and everyone was required to use it. In the security group, I was responsible for the “problems” part, which we defined in a slightly simplified way as repeated or more severe incidents. That didn’t take much of my time, but it also forced me to keep track of every incident reported by or assigned to the security team. At the same time, it was a chance to study ITIL and its processes a bit more.

It was around that time that an old wish of mine resurfaced: to take my family abroad for an experience. That idea had been around since I started thinking about doing a PhD, something I mentioned in a previous chapter. One of my first attempts was through an agreement between the Central Bank and the BIS (Bank for International Settlements), an international organization whose members are central banks. I applied but wasn’t selected. That probably happened because I was still relatively new and also because I lacked the so-called “political support” within the bank to get something like that.

I also tried some opportunities in the private sector. I applied for a few positions and even got a few interviews. One of them was with PwC in the UK, which marked the first time I did a videoconference interview in a meeting room full of specialized equipment. Until then, these contacts usually only happened over the phone. On another occasion, I took part in a Google hiring process for a security position. I got to the phone interview, but didn’t make it to the next stage.

In any case, these interviews helped me better understand how this kind of hiring process works. To this day, Gisele and I like to say it’s always important to do a job interview every now and then, maybe once every year or two, if only to stay sharp in that kind of conversation.

Since we were in Brasília, and as I already mentioned in a previous chapter, the city’s culture has a strong interest on civil service exams. So, we would end up hearing about exams that were happening even without actively tracking them. In the federal civil service, there are basically two ways to achieve career advancement, that is, more significant pay raises.

The first is within the agency where you already work, by obtaining commissioned positions. A commissioned position normally corresponds to a pay raise, but almost always comes with a heavier workload or more responsibility. Besides, you are always dependent on your superiors wanting to keep you in that position. And, as in any organization, there’s a bottleneck: there aren’t management positions for everyone.

The other way is to join a higher-paying agency. There are some agencies that historically offer higher salaries than others within the Brazilian federal administration. Although there is a constitutional provision saying that civil servants should earn equivalent salaries when performing similar roles, in practice this doesn’t happen. Career structures are usually defined based on the agency where you work, not on the type of work performed. That means the Central Bank has its own career structure and its own salary table, while CGU has another, even though both have professionals doing very similar work, such as IT.

There are also some positions that are known for being rare, that is, they only open with very long intervals. Sometimes five or even ten years pass between one exam and the next. When one of these exams is announced, it’s usually seen as a unique, often not-to-be-missed, opportunity.

That’s what happened while I was still at the Central Bank: the Chamber of Deputies announced positions that included openings for IT personnel. Historically, the Chamber paid better than the Central Bank. It also represented a way to diversify the family’s income, since public agencies sometimes take quite a while to grant salary increases and they don’t always happen at the same time for all agencies. Since Gisele and I worked at the same agency and our raises would happen at the same time, there was a higher risk that both our salaries would fall behind at the same time. If we were in different agencies, there was a greater chance that at least one of the two salaries would stay at a more favorable level.

On top of that, there was also the influence of the city’s own culture. So my brother and I went to take the exam, as did several friends and acquaintances. I already knew some of them would be taking the test; others I ran into there on the day of the exam. In the end, I passed the Chamber of Deputies exam. That led to the decision: did I really want to make this change? I thought about it a bit, talked to some colleagues who already worked there, and decided to take the position as soon as I was called.

I also talked to my boss. Since it was the civil service, there wasn’t much he could offer to try to convince me to stay. He did offer me a trip to the RSA conference that year, which was basically all he could offer. That ended up being a sign that he had really valued my work.

And so I set off for my next adventure: IT analyst at the Chamber of Deputies. But that’s a story for another chapter.